Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies
婴儿性别检测、选择性生育以及数千年来男尊女卑的偏见，一个性别比例极度失衡的社会由此诞生！
2010年月4日|经济学人印刷版
XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’
薛欣然（1988到1997年主持电台节目,邀请女性听众通过电话来讲述她们的故事.有英文著作《中国好女人们》。译者注。），一位中国作家，这样描述她去广东沂蒙山区一个农户家庭采访的情景。当时这家人的妻子正在生小孩。“我们在厨房里，但是那里很小几乎没有坐的地方”她写道：“当我们听到隔壁传来一声痛苦哀嚎时…一阵婴儿的哭声从隔壁传来，但是瞬间就突然停止了！接着有人啜泣，一个男子沙哑的声音职责到：没用的东西！”（如您来自一个偏远的农村，这种职责可能不会陌生。这是这位男子在职责自己的妻子没能生出一个男孩为家里传宗接代！而生了女儿的妻子竟然会也会认同是自己的肚子不争气，由此而羞愧不已没脸见人。——译者注）
“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’
“还没等我反映过来，我想我当时只是感觉到身后的一个盛有污水的桶在动，”欣然女士回忆道，“当我转身细看时，我被吓到了。我看到一只小脚伸出桶外，费劲地挣扎着。我可以肯定是那位接生婆将那个刚刚出生的活生生的女婴溺进了这个污水桶里。我当时真想把自己也溺进那桶里。但是两个随我而来的警察用力地抓住我的肩膀，对我说，算了，已经来不及救她了，太晚了！”（在中国没有出台正式的法律禁止溺婴之前，这一幕在中国的农村常常发生。现在这种情况似乎好转了很多，因为很多人会花钱去照B超鉴别之后再选择性生育。尽管在中国用B超鉴别婴儿性别也是法律明文禁止的。译者注。）
“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”
“但这是谋杀啊！ 你们这些警察就这样眼睁睁地看着？！”我抗议着，女婴的脚渐渐停止了挣扎。两位警察就这样一直抓住我的肩膀，我呆呆地站在那里。“在这个地方溺死个把女婴并不是什么大事”一位中年女人心平气和理直气壮地对我说。“但是那是一个活生生的孩子啊！”我指着那溺死女婴的桶，声音颤抖地控诉道。“那不算是一个孩子”中年妇女反驳我说“那只是一个刚刚出生的女婴，我们不能养她。不管从哪一方面来说，我们总不能没有儿子过一辈子吧？女婴不能算数。”
In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.
在2010年中国社会科学研究院的一份报告中，显示了“女婴不能算数”所带来的后果。在十年间，社科院说，五个男人之中将有一个无法婚配。这都是因为年轻的女性就这样静静地死在小乡村里了。这是史无前例的！
The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.
这些数据都是来自于低于19岁的年龄层的性别调查。根据社科院的报告，在2020年，中国会男性会比同年龄层的女性多3，000万到4，000万人。于此相比，德国法国和英国的所有20岁以下的男性为2，300万人。美国这一年龄层的男性数量为 4，000万人。因此，在十年之后，中国将面临的是拥有一个庞大的社会群体，他们的数量是美国相同年龄的男性的总数，是欧洲最大的三个国家年轻男性数量的三倍。这个群体他们无法结婚，没有家庭的束缚，也无法承担婚姻和培育下一代的责任（因为男女比例失衡—译者注^_^）。
Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.
性别灭绝——借玛丽安妮华伦1985年出版的一本书的书名——通常被视为中国一个家庭只能生一个孩子的计划生育政策的副产品，或者是其愚昧无知的产物。但这只是冰山一角。。剩余的单身汉——中国人叫“光棍”——在1990到2005间数量明显增加，这看起来和1079年开始执行的计划生育政策似乎没有必然的联系。但是，随着我们了解地深入，我们意识到，存在这一问题的不仅仅是中国。
Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.
与北部的邻居中国十分相似的是，印度的很多地方性别倾斜也十分严重。其他东部亚洲国家和地区——南韩，新加坡和台湾——也有着相当高的男性出生率。存在同一问题的还有苏联解体之后的高加索山脉附近的以及巴尔干半岛以西的一些共产主义国家。在某些美洲国家的部分人口比列也存在这一情况。
The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.
真正的原因，尼克艾伯斯塔德，一名美国企业研究所的人口统计学家，华盛顿特区智能团专家说，不仅仅是因为任何国家的人口政策，而是“严重的对男孩的偏爱，以及广泛运用的出生前婴儿性别检测和选择性生育”。这是一个全球化的趋势。同样，女性性别灭绝也是一个全球化的问题。
Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.
在婴幼儿时期，男孩比女孩更容易死去。作为补偿，生养更多的男孩可以使得青春期的男女数量持平。根据出生婴孩记录，平均100个女孩诞生时一般情况下会有103到106个男孩出生。这个比率过去一直持平，而且渐渐作为一种自然规律被人们所接受。
That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.
但是这种规律在过去的25年被彻底地颠覆了。在中国，1985到1989年，每一百个女孩出生的同时出生男婴的数量为108，已经远远超过了自然比列的范畴。2000年到2004年这一比率上升为124（也就是说，100个女婴诞生的同时有124名男婴降世）。根据中国社科院的研究表明，现在这一比率为123：100。如非人为干涉，这一结果根据生物学理论是决计不可能出现的！
The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal*, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”
全国平均数据之后掩盖着令人惊叹的省区的新生儿性别差距。根据对中国家庭2005年末
的数据分析以及英国医学杂志*（在后面有解释——译者注）的报告显示，只有一个地区，即西藏区的出生婴儿性别率是在自然出身性别率范围内的。14个省——多半是在中国的东部和南部——出生婴儿性别比率都在120及以上，其中三个省甚至超过了130。就像中国社会科学研究院所说的那样“性别不平衡的趋势正在逐年加剧。”
The BMJ study also casts light on one of the puzzles about China’s sexual imbalance. How far has it been exaggerated by the presumed practice of not reporting the birth of baby daughters in the hope of getting another shot at bearing a son? Not much, the authors think. If this explanation were correct, you would expect to find sex ratios falling precipitously as girls who had been hidden at birth start entering the official registers on attending school or the doctor. In fact, there is no such fall. The sex ratio of 15-year-olds in 2005 was not far from the sex ratio at birth in 1990. The implication is that sex-selective abortion, not under-registration of girls, accounts for the excess of boys.
英国医学杂志的研究使人们更清楚地看清中国性别比率不平衡后面的一些未解之谜。人们为了生一个男孩而去隐瞒向政府报告已经出生的女儿的数量真的如预料中的那么多么？专家说，远非如此。假设被隐瞒的女性出生人口真如预料中的那么多，你将看到到了这些被隐瞒登记的女婴上学或者就医的年龄之后男女性别比率的急剧地下滑。但事实上，2005年15岁的人口男女性别比列和1990年新生儿性别比列相比并没有太大的出入。这就意味着，男性过多的原因并非是没有将部分新出生的女婴登记到政府部门，而是性别选择性生育。
Other countries have wildly skewed sex ratios without China’s draconian population controls (see chart 1). Taiwan’s sex ratio also rose from just above normal in 1980 to 110 in the early 1990s; it remains just below that level today. During the same period, South Korea’s sex ratio rose from just above normal to 117 in 1990—then the highest in the world—before falling back to more natural levels. Both these countries were already rich, growing quickly and becoming more highly educated even while the balance between the sexes was swinging sharply towards males.
就算没有像中国那样严格的计划生育政策，其他国家的性别比例也十分堪虞。台湾的性别比率从1980年的只是刚刚超出正常范围到1990年的110；到现在也在这一比率之下。与此同期，南韩的性别比例则从刚刚超出正常范围到1990年的117——在当时是世界最高的——此后回调到了一个基本正常的水平。虽然这些国家和地区都还十分富裕，增长也很迅速而且人们的教育水平也很高，但是性别比例失衡却在日渐加剧。
South Korea is experiencing some surprising consequences. The surplus of bachelors in a rich country has sucked in brides from abroad. In 2008, 11% of marriages were “mixed”, mostly between a Korean man and a foreign woman. This is causing tensions in a hitherto homogenous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed marriages. The trend is especially marked in rural areas, where the government thinks half the children of farm households will be mixed by 2020. The children are common enough to have produced a new word: “Kosians”, or Korean-Asians.
南韩现在正在经历着当时117的性别比率带来的出乎预料的困境。在比较富裕的乡村的过盛的单身汉们去国外“进口新娘”。在2008年，11%的婚姻是跨国的，也就是一个韩国男人和一个外国女人结婚。这对于这个到目前为止都是纯血统的社会而言带来了前所未有的压力，大家都对跨国的婚姻充满敌意。跨国婚姻在一些农村地区更加明显，政府预测在这些农民家庭，在2020年，可能有一半的孩子会是混血儿。人们用““Kosians”或是Korean-Asians这样的新名词还称呼这些混血儿。
China is nominally a communist country, but elsewhere it was communism’s collapse that was associated with the growth of sexual disparities. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, there was an upsurge in the ratio of boys to girls in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Their sex ratios rose from normal levels in 1991 to 115-120 by 2000. A rise also occurred in several Balkan states after the wars of Yugoslav succession. The ratio in Serbia and Macedonia is around 108. There are even signs of distorted sex ratios in America, among various groups of Asian-Americans. In 1975, calculates Mr Eberstadt, the sex ratio for Chinese-, Japanese- and Filipino-Americans was between 100 and 106. In 2002, it was 107 to 109.
中国在名义上是一个共产主义国家，但是处处都是共产主义的腐败，并充斥着很强烈的性别歧视。在1991年苏联解体之后，美国，阿塞拜疆和格鲁吉亚的男性对女性比列突然加大。这些国家的性别比率从1991年的正常上升到了 2000年的115到120。在南斯拉夫胜利之后，巴尔干半岛的一些国家的性别比率也在上涨。在塞尔维亚和马其顿王国大约为108。在1975年，根据艾伯斯塔德先生的计算，中国，日本，菲律宾裔美国人的性别比例为100到106之间。在2002年，为107到109。
But the country with the most remarkable record is that other supergiant, India. India does not produce figures for sex ratios at birth, so its numbers are not strictly comparable with the others. But there is no doubt that the number of boys has been rising relative to girls and that, as in China, there are large regional disparities. The north-western states of Punjab and Haryana have sex ratios as high as the provinces of China’s east and south. Nationally, the ratio for children up to six years of age rose from a biologically unexceptionable 104 in 1981 to a biologically impossible 108 in 2001. In 1991, there was a single district with a sex ratio over 125; by 2001, there were 46.
但是有着一场引人瞩目记录的确是另一个巨头：印度。印度并没有新生儿性别比率的图表，没有数字可供于其他国家做严格的比较。但是毫无疑问的是，相对于女性男性的出生比率一直在升高，而且与中国一样，这种比率存在着区域性的差别。在Punjab 西北的一些地区和哈里亚纳帮的性别比率和中国东部和南部是一样的。持续六年全国人口出生性别比率从无可挑剔的1981年的104到2001年按正常出生无法达到的108。在1992年，某些地区的性别比率增加到了125，截止至2001年，是46。
